By Chris Lee

“Social search” – the popularity of stories trending over social networks such as Facebook and Twitter – is becoming a key factor in rankings on search engines such as Google and Bing, according to search marketing software specialist, Searchmetrics. UK news sites DailyMail.co.uk and the Guardian Online are the most visible, the company said, following a ten-week study.

The research, which analysed how often content from 12 leading newspaper sites was shared on six popular social networking and bookmarking sites, placed Dailymail.co.uk in top position, with links to its pages being shared 2,908,779 times a week on average. Guardian.co.uk came second with an average 2,587,258 links being shared on social sites every week.

Searchmetrics monitored links from 12 newspaper web sites which were shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Google+.

Shared wisdom

The sharing of “social news” is fast becoming a key battleground for search marketers, according to Dr Horst Joepen, Searchmetrics’ CEO.

“Social news – that is news and articles that are shared or recommended by your friends and followers on social sites – is potentially an important source of traffic for online news sites,” Dr Joepen explained. “It’s worth noting that search engines, such as Google and Bing are starting to include popularity on social networks as a factor when judging the quality of web pages and how they should be ranked in search listings. So it’s important for news and other web sites to build and monitor visibility on social sites if they want to rank highly and attract visitors via search”

The Daily Mail topped UK social news search with 2.9 million links per week, followed by the Guardian with 2.59 million links per week. Quite some way behind in third was the Telegraph with 880,000 links per week, followed by the Independent, Sun and FT’s online news sites.

The most frequently shared content on Dailymail.co.uk was shown to be an article (with images) about the Japan earthquake which had been shared 392,521 times on the monitored social sites. Guardian.co.uk’s most frequently shared content was a humorous quiz discussing quotes from Muammar Gaddafi and Charlie Sheen.

Stumbling upon success

Searchmetrics also analysed the spread of social networks on which Dailymail.co.uk’s pages were shared over a six-month period, revealing that the site received over half of its links (50.78 per cent) on social bookmarking site StumbleUpon, with Facebook activity (likes, shares and comments) accounting for 45.87 per cent and links on Twitter 3.21 per cent.

More than half (56.77 per cent) of Guardian.co.uk’s social links came from Facebook, with StumbleUpon accounting for 31.35 per cent and Twitter 10.98 per cent according to the study.

The trend for links to come from StumbleUpon does not surprise Dr Joepen.

“Some people we have shown this data to have been surprised at the volume of links generated for UK newspapers on the StumbleUpon social bookmarking site. This is a very popular site globally and the links could have been generated throughout the world from English speakers who use StumbleUpon,” he concluded.